My Taillight

In the forty-eight years that I’ve been driving, I have been stopped four times. That’s less than once a decade.

The first, with our young kids in the back seat, was for a broken taillight for which we received an exceedingly polite warning: “Excuse me for bothering you, but did you know your taillight is out? You’ll probably want to get that taken care of.” It was in my neighborhood just about a mile and a half from where Philando Castile was killed.

The second ticket was for speeding in the same neighborhood. Again, the exchange was respectful and businesslike.

The third was in the diverse neighborhood of Frogtown, when I was giving a mother and her son a ride to a social services agency to file some paperwork.  I was stopped right in front of the police station, ostensibly for not yielding to a pedestrian who had yet to step off the curb. The officer asked me if I was okay and gave all of us a good looking over. He added speeding to the ticket as an afterthought, though I had just turned a corner and was going, by my calculations, less than 30 miles an hour. I have always remarked to friends that the only time I’ve felt overly scrutinized and unfairly treated was when I had Black passengers in the car. But I didn’t say anything at the time. I paid the fine.

My fourth stop was again for a taillight, this time on the East Side, near Philando’s home. My fine was efficiently and politely waived at the courthouse when I provided proof that I’d had the bulb replaced.

When I heard this morning that Philando Castile has been stopped almost 50 times since 2006, often in the same neighborhoods where I drive without a second thought, and that he was paying back fines sometimes at a rate of up to $500 a month, my heart sank for the gazillionth time this week. I am running out of hope.

My despair comes from the sheer size, complexity, and depth of the problem, and from my own inadvertent complicity. The root causes are not solved simply by removing a few individual police officers who racially profile, though better training and accountability should be high up on the list. My discomfort lies in the fact that such racial profiling – whether or not I have admitted it exists or have condoned the practice - is done on my behalf.

I like my city to be safe. I pay my taxes gladly so that we have a professional police force to keep it that way. But if my safety and peace of mind comes at the expense of a young Black man who, for driving the same roads as I do, pays with his hard-earned cash and ultimately with his life, there is something seriously wrong with America and with me for not working harder to manifest a country and culture I can be proud of. 

Castile's traffic stop record from NPR.

The Man Who Walks His Cat

There’s a man in my neighborhood who regularly walks his cat with a long, scraggly leash of string. I see them when I’m out walking, too. Sometimes we give each other a small, shy salute, sometimes he adds, “Great day,” or “Good to be outside,” or, noting my slight limp and slow gait, “Gotta keep walking!” He limps, too. Well, lurches quite a bit from side to side. The man doesn’t ask me how I’m feeling, and I don’t tell him. We’re probably about the same age. Baggy shorts and a wide tee shirt only accentuate the fact that the he is heavyset and sloppy. His long gray hair hangs in dirty streaks down to his shoulders and his smile reveals a missing tooth. By contrast, the orange tabby cat is perfectly groomed, well fed and silky. She trots daintily out in front, and when she stops, he lets out the leash and leans on the nearest car to smoke a cigarette until she tires of sniffing grass.

How silly to walk a cat, I often think as I pass them, how superfluous the leash. Cats are meant to skulk through neighborhoods alone, crunching on mice and examining the underside of every porch.

Yesterday, I heard some one calling over and over a name I couldn’t catch. Nor did I recognize the voice until the man passed next to my open window – three feet from where I sat. He crashed through my backyard, beating my hosta with his stick and alternating the cat’s name with “fuck,” a word I understood more clearly. He didn’t look as friendly as I remembered – old and boozy and maybe a little mean. Or crazy.

“First time I took off the leash,” he exclaimed when I went to the porch to investigate. He held up the ratty twine and shook his head. “I thought it’d be okay, but then she saw a rabbit. She’s here somewhere,” he said and crouched awkwardly down to look under where I stood. It’s the man who walks his cat, I thought, and immediately felt less afraid.

“She’ll come home when she’s tired,” I assured him.

“Sure she will, but I just don’t like leaving her alone like this.”

For a good half hour I heard him calling near and far. Three times he came back to search my yard to no avail, each time sounding a little more desperate and hitting my plants just a little bit harder. A few kind-hearted neighbors began to gather in the street. Nobody knew what to do. “Found her!” he shouted triumphantly from the corner, and the ladies went back inside.

This morning I saw the pair of them come toward me, the cat strutting daintily, not even pulling at the leash. From half a block away, the man smiled and lifted his hand in a little greeting and then followed the cat’s lead into the alley where she’d found a garbage can intriguing. It’s a beautiful morning. The air is fresh, the sky is clear. How funny to walk a cat, I catch myself musing as always. But then I think, if you want to hang out with your best friend on a day like this, I guess a leash will sometimes do.

The Bugle

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When my father drank a little too much, he blew some spotty approximation of Taps on a dented old bugle kept on the shelf for such occasions. It didn’t happen often. One instance particularly stands out – New Years Eve - classic cocktail dresses, martini glasses, and cigarettes, lots of cigarettes. The bugle sound that reached my bedroom most resembled a laughing cow.

I didn’t really connect Taps with my dad’s experience in the war because he never talked about it. Yes, a few unconnected highlights are woven into my childhood narrative, the stuff of heroes: a narrow escape when his ship blew up just off the beach, a long winter slog through something called the Battle of the Bulge. But it was useless to ask for any details or emotions to go with these vignettes. My dad would only shrug his shoulders. “Oh, it wasn’t so bad,” he’d say, and change the subject.

He only broke his code of silence when, on a family trip, we passed through the Belgian village where he’d been cornered by a sniper. My father shared, for once, what it felt like to be scared. I was an impressionable sixteen, not that much younger than he'd been at the time. I had seen a few of the post-war movies, and Vietnam was then unfolding on TV. His brief but heartfelt confession was enough to draw an outline - a dotted one at least - of my father as the young and universal soldier.

Fast forward a few decades, and my teenage son got his grandfather talking to a video camera. Their three-day session filled in more of the logistical details, and included the long, quiet pauses my father required to get the story out. The hero images from my childhood began to take a more substantial and personal shape.

This year, the picture’s finally been completed and brought to life, my dad’s short journey from gawky kid to war-weary young man unsure of his next steps. My sister has assembled all the letters Dad sent home, a monumental task because, it turns out, he was quite the prolific writer. She combined his letters with day-by-day historic accounts of his battalion(s)’ march across the continent. And in this rendering we see the heart of it, the heart of him – a cockiness snuffed out by disappointment, boredom, hunger, loneliness, and fear; ardor dampened by the growing chasm between his experiences on the cold and muddy battlefields and those of my mother on the manicured lawns of her college campus. How, he wondered aloud, could they ever close the gap?

The picture that emerges now is clear enough to make the soldier discernably my dad, not any other soldier, not any other man. The intimacy of his letters – not intentionally left for us to read – takes me beyond understanding, finally, his experience of the war. It fills in the outline of who he became when the war was over, the man I knew growing up, the man who played the bugle when he got a little drunk.

This morning I heard Taps played on the radio. The tone was bright and clear, the moment poignant. But I turned the radio off. I wanted to hear that other version, the butchered one. I wanted to hear my father play his bugle one more time and tell me, "Oh, it wasn't so bad."